Using quotemeta() or \Q..\E as suggested by others is the correct thing to do.

The reason your regexp was failing was the existence of too many forward slashes. Either use a different delimeter, or escape your forward slashes in your pattern:

  grep m|c:/apps/c\+\+/application| =>
    'c:/apps/c++/application/myfile.cpp';

  grep /c:\/apps\/c\+\+\/application/ =>
    'c:/apps/c++/application/myfile.cpp';
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